Rick Scott from The Villages

The search for just who the hell actually voted for this guy turns up lots of kids, in a retirement community that bans humans under the age of 18 winters. That’s right. In The Villages they measure time by the Beowulf-esque Saxon tradition of how many winters you’ve survived.

And Rick Scott is surrounded by kids. That seems… out of place, to my experience in The Villages, and whats more they’re all excited and happy.

Charter school students were bused in to surround Scott for the signing and were handed homemade signs to wave. When Scott was finished, a man in a tea party T-shirt began encouraging the children to chant Scott’s campaign slogan, “Let’s get to work.”

Yet again, cynicism overload. The man couldn’t – who would sink so slow – possibly have shipped in kids to fake happiness – and youthful support – at this vomitous budgetary mess. Seriously, look at the PDF of stuff that was stricken from the law with Scott’s line-item veto.

Those line vetoes amount to $615 million in savings. Somewhat surprisingly, what Scott heralds in the video as a boon for statewide educational spending amount to a full page of cuts specifically to state universities and community colleges. I’m just pointing out the dichotomy and problem of message here and not passing judgment. Our state has serious budgetary problems that once you take taxes off the table become insurmountable and since Scott’s chosen that route, I understand why he has to experience 100db Dream Theater guitar solo levels of cognitive dissonance about cutting millions to statewide education and development programs while calling it responsible: “Less Waste More For Education” [sic].

Now, we turn to the admirably more liberal St. Pete Times for dissension from the above objective coverage.

According to the Times, about 200 people attended the “private event” at the rented Town Center (remember?) in The Villages.

At the urging of Scott officials, Sumter County sheriff’s deputies escorted a group of more than a dozen Democrats — mainly retirees who live in The Villages — from Thursday’s event at the town square.

The Villages Democratic club has about 275 members according to the Times, which says to me that very few of The Villages 80,000+ senior voters are active voters, as is widely believed to be the case of old folks, right?Or that they’re all Tea Partiers/independents/loonatics.

So what’s the message here. That out of more than 80k incensed seniors, the best Scott could cook up were 200 old people, minus the shipped in youth. What if they’d not shipped in the Charter kids? And instead this rally looked increasingly like the last hurrahs of the Greatest Generation. Legions of John McCain lookalikes, male and female, supporting Scott’s budgetary fire and all quietly acquiescing to fuck over minorities, the young, students, etc. Anything that got in the way of their Medicare and subsidized shuffle board.

But he knew better, and before we all received Scott’s cooked up fire in our veins, we all got to see the true cynicism here. Something I’ll eventually get to tackling in long form. But, that a man who could join the race at the last possible moment, throw magnitudes more money into the race than his competitors, say basically nothing ever, and promise lots about jobs without proof. And since winning, all the while he sits there undermining what few protections the public has against free-form capitalism in this state. He cuts taxes to corporations, remove startup fees – basically shovels budgetary pay dirt into small and large corporations. Meanwhile we sit around with our thumbs in our ass, convinced that a group of prepubescent charter students shipped into a retirement community all love Scott’s penis-like form to death.